Category Archives: Writing/Memory/History

Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books

Here is another interesting article about reading and comprehension and comparing ebooks to printed paper books.

“Science Has Great News for People Who Read Actual Books”

Here is a short excerpt “Our brains were not designed for reading, but have adapted and created new circuits to understand letters and texts. The brain reads by constructing a mental representation of the text based on the placement of the page in the book and the word on the page.”  I know, for myself personally, when I read and I’m trying to recall something I read, I get a mental picture of what side of the page the quote or sentence I was thinking about was on.

What do other people think?  How do you read and remember?  What do you think about all these new studies coming out talking about either how multitasking and reading online is training our brains to learn in new ways or how reading a printed item allows for more comprehension and understanding?  Can they both be true?

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Is Google Making Students Stupid?

This article, “Is Google Making Students Stupid?: Outsourcing menial tasks to machines can seem liberating, but it may be robbing a whole generation of certain basic mental abilities.” by Nick Romeo appeared September 30, 2014 in The Atlantic.  I thought it was  interesting and fit well with our readings this week by Paul Duguid “Material Matters: Aspect of the Past and the Futurology of the Book and Carla Hesse “Books in Time

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Slate: Pew Study Says that Millennials are Actually Well Read Library Users

This article is related to the discussion of Crisis/feigning Crisis and it’s effect of the American educational system…The Pew study is revealing it’s fabrication, but I think educational companies will use this to sell more of it’s new media services.

The article makes me think of the “generational divide” that Losh mentioned, it’s relation to a technological divide, and how millennials–who, I am guessing, makes up a few of us in the New Media Literacies class–relate to their older/younger peers/students in the classroom/any learning environment. Is there a dynamic that we should explore?

Anyways, let me stop rambling.

Quote from the article:

“What’s more, libraries are not a cherished refuge of the old, but a destination for the young: In a September 2013 survey, 50 percent of respondents between the ages of 16 and 29 had used a library in the past year, compared with 47 percent of their older counterparts, and 36 percent of people under 30 had used a library website in that same time frame; compared with 28 percent of the over-30s…”

Read the Slate article. Read the actual study.

Tell me what y’all think,

 

Chrislande

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